Trade‐Offs for Climate‐Smart Forestry in Europe Under Uncertain Future Climate

Abstract

Forests mitigate climate change by storing carbon and reducing emissions via substitution effects of wood products. Additionally, they provide many other important ecosystem services (ESs), but are vulnerable to climate change; therefore, adaptation is necessary. Climate‐smart forestry combines mitigation with adaptation, whilst facilitating the provision of many ESs. This is particularly challenging due to large uncertainties about future climate. Here, we combined ecosystem modeling with robust multi‐criteria optimization to assess how the provision of various ESs (climate change mitigation, timber provision, local cooling, water availability, and biodiversity habitat) can be guaranteed under a broad range of climate futures across Europe. Our optimized portfolios contain 29% unmanaged forests, and implicate a successive conversion of 34% of coniferous to broad‐leaved forests (11% vice versa). Coppices practically vanish from Southern Europe, mainly due to their high water requirement. We find the high shares of unmanaged forests necessary to keep European forests a carbon sink while broad‐leaved and unmanaged forests contribute to local cooling through biogeophysical effects. Unmanaged forests also pose the largest benefit for biodiversity habitat. However, the increased shares of unmanaged and broad‐leaved forests lead to reductions in harvests. This raises the question of how to meet increasing wood demands without transferring ecological impacts elsewhere or enhancing the dependence on more carbon‐intensive industries. Furthermore, the mitigation potential of forests depends on assumptions about the decarbonization of other industries and is consequently crucially dependent on the emission scenario. Our findings highlight that trade‐offs must be assessed when developing concrete strategies for climate‐smart forestry.

Forest carbon stock development following extreme drought-induced dieback of coniferous stands in Central Europe: a CBM-CFS3 model application

“…9 showing the example of NAI for spruce and fir, which have contrasting trends of representation by the forest area. Evidently, set-aside areas balance climate and biodiversity considerations, which should be weighed up [ 44 ]. Note also that a complete evaluation should include substitution benefits from HWP utilization and substitution function of forestry [ 44 , 45 ], which was not considered here.…”

Options to improve the carbon balance of the harvested wood products sector in four EU countries

“…For example, the German timber industry uses 85% softwood, 13% hardwood and 2% tropical wood (Krtschil et al., 2022). In addition, stand species diversification due to the application of climate‐smart forestry strategies will also result in a reduction of softwood produced and an increase in hardwood (Gregor et al., 2022). With this Material scenario, we want to show the potential added value of innovative hardwood utilisation which currently is underestimated within the forest‐based sector.…”

How to Optimize Carbon Sinks and Biodiversity in the Conversion of Norway Spruce to Beech Forests in Austria?

“…The portfolio of measures includes retention of old-growth habitat structures and provision of connectivity, increase in tree species diversity, enhancement of deadwood amount and quality, and habitat trees while also allowing for natural disturbance processes. Currently, attempts to assess synergies and tradeoffs between forest-based climate mitigation and conservation have focused on optimizing set-aside forests for biodiversity, which simultaneously have a high potential carbon density [21,22,26]. However, to our knowledge, an assessment of the synergies and tradeoffs of a more comprehensive portfolio of conservation measures is not yet available.…”